The effectiveness of federal competition policy is secondary to collecting scalps

Editor's note: The op-ed from the Washington Times was written by William F. Shughart, J. Fish
Smith Professor in Public Choice, and Diana Thomas, assistant professor, both from the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are busier than ever before in history as antitrust law enforcement agencies, and that's bad news for American businesses. The Justice Department's recent decision to allow the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, conditional on the selling of a comparative handful of the two carriers' takeoff and landing slots at Washington Reagan National and New York's LaGuardia airports, is a poster child of the Obama administration's competition policy stance during the president's first term in the White House.